What Probably Didn't Happen Next
by Spooky-Cactus
Summary: Ace meets Random. Rimmer (briefly) is a sausage. Death wants revenge. Lister is the Chosen One. Random, a male princess and Zaphod Beeblebrox quest with Ace to find the true Ruler of the Multiverse... who is definitely not a ham sandwich. Slashy when I ge
1. Insults and Insanity

What Probably Didn't Happen Next  
  
AN: Warning: may be crap. Carries on directly from Only the Good, and crosses over with Hitchhiker's Guide. Will probably be long, confusing, and in all probability not very good. I had to write it anyway. Please give me your opinion.

PS: Discworld fans may notice something familiar about the way Death talks. I just had to put it in.  
  
PalletShade aka Spooky Cactus (and I have about fifteen other screen names too)

* * *

Inside a neat, silver, top-of-the-range, built-to-last spaceship, a figure sat in a chair. Head on backrest, eyes closed. It seemed almost asleep. It was a curious creature with greeny-grey skin and an expensive complexion. Everything about it, or, for sake of a better pronoun, him, was distinctly alien, from his large bald head and bulbous eyes to the design on his collar.  
  
Most people would be startled if the anthropoid incarnation of Death appeared from a shadowy gateway behind them, but not this figure.

Death meant nothing to Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.  
  
"GOOD EVENING." said Death, in tones as cold and heavy as wrought iron gates to a graveyard.  
  
Wowbagger sat up and slowly swivelled around on his chair. "Do you really think so?" he asked in a tired voice.  
  
"PERHAPS IT IS, FOR SOMEONE."  
  
"Probably. Probably I should find that person and insult them really badly."  
  
"HOW'S THAT GOING, BY THE WAY?"  
  
"What? Oh, the insult thing. I stopped."  
  
"WHY?"  
  
It was not for Death to support or otherwise the actions of mortals or even accidental-immortals, but he had always thought what Wowbagger was doing was commendable. The sheer pointlessness and impossibility of it all just added weight to this demonstration of the Immortal's dedication. Perhaps that was why, when he wished for companionship other than the other Horsemen, who could be very annoying, especially when drunk, he came here. As far as Death can feel, he felt a real empathy with Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. Their missions, he thought, were similar - both would visit every life form in the Universe, and neither would be welcome on arrival. Wowbagger's self-imposed purpose in his immortal life had been to insult the universe. Individually, one by one, and (this was the bit he really had to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order.  
  
"Have you heard of Arthur Dent?" asked Wowbagger.  
  
"I KNOW ALL."  
  
"He's the reason I stopped. Somehow that swutting son of a starbeast managed to get on my list twice."  
  
"I SEE."  
  
"Messed up the whole thing."  
  
There was a paused. The Immortal and the allegorical figure regarded each other for a moment.  
  
"YOU WOULDN'T CONSIDER DOING ME A FAVOUR, WOULD YOU?"  
  
"Depends what it entails."  
  
"I WANT YOU TO INSULT SOMEONE."  
  
"Oh, I'm good at that. Who?"  
  
"HIS NAME IS ARNOLD JUDAS RIMMER. HE WAS VERY RUDE. VERY IRREVERENT. VERY PAINFUL." Death adjusted his posture painfully.  
  
"Mortals."  
  
"YEAH."  
  
"So, species, sector of origin?"  
  
"HUMAN, ZZ10 Z PLURAL Z ALPHA."  
  
Wowbagger typed the relevant information into the computer. "Can you do a trace on that?" he asked it.  
  
"Computing." said the computer in its flat, vaguely-female voice. "Found. Two matches present in this universe."  
  
"Two?"  
  
Two images came up on a monitor. One was of a guy in a uniform with bad hair, and the other was of a handsome, action-movie-hero kind of guy in a shiny flight jacket and a floppy blond wig.  
  
"HIM." Death said, pointing with a skeletal finger, "THE ONE THAT LOOKS LIKE A WEASEL. NOT THE BLOND ONE - HE LOOKS LIKE A GREAT PERSON. WHAT A GUY."  
  
Wowbagger nodded his agreement to the above statement, and plotted course for the one who looked like a weasel.  
  
"GIVE 'IM HELL." Said Death, and vanished into the Realm of Shadows, or possibly went down to Asda for some waffles.  
  
Wowbagger sighed. "How long will it take to find this Rimmer guy?"  
  
"Computing." A tiny pause. "Two weeks, three days, four hours and seventeen seconds."  
  
The thing Wowbagger liked best about his special custom personality-free computer was that it didn't try to make conversation.  
  
"Any movies that I haven't seen five thousand times already?"  
  
"Well, _'Dude, Where's My Hyperspace-Traversing GPP-Enabled Inter-Planetary Space-car?'_ you've only seen four thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven times. And there's a new one.  
  
"New?"  
  
"I picked it up on that last planetoid, the one where you told that squirrel that she had the wit and sophistication of the Bugblatter-drool- covered remains of a Vogon's grandmother. It's called _'The Best Bang Since the Big One'_, and it's Eccentrica Gallumbits' personal biography of Zaphod Beeblebrox, as a movie."  
  
"I'll go with '_Dude Where's my.._ etcetera."  
  
"Wise choice."  
  
The sleek silver ship hurtled on into space, towards a certain Arnold Judas Rimmer...

* * *

It can be a little disconcerting when you're almost definitely about to die on a burning, virus-ridden ship to suddenly find yourself on a different, intact, familiar ship where something is distinctly odd. It disconcerted Rimmer like hell.  
  
Rimmer, the one who looked like a weasel, was in Starbug. Or at least he thought he was. But if he was in Starbug, then there was something very funny going on. Like the way the sea stayed steady as a rock and the buildings kept washing up and down. That was pretty odd, but it was even stranger when thought of in conjunction with the fact that JMC landing vessels didn't normally contain either buildings or seas.  
  
Another odd thing, or rather things, were the other occupants of the ship. These included a gorilla with dreadlocks, and a ham sandwich which could talk, and used its gift of speech to state repeatedly in broken Norwegian that it was not a ham sandwich, it was an overweight purple rabbit who served as assistant dog-catcher in a nondescript village on the small island of Belgium in the Dutch East-Indies.  
  
There was also a cat. Not a vain, semi-intelligent humanoid, but an actual small furry animal with whiskers and a liking for fish and leaving dead birds on the living room carpet. It was a Siamese, and its distinguishing features included a slightly darker grey front-left paw and a total absence of body from the waist down. This didn't seem to hinder the cat at all, it moved exactly the way it would have had its body been there. The cat help up a hand mirror in the hand which it obviously didn't have, and Rimmer got to have a look at himself.  
  
He was a sausage.  
  
Well that was just great.  
  
Not just a sausage, but a sausage with sunglasses. And a bowler hat.  
  
Things, he decided, were getting extremely weird.  
  
A voice sounded through the ship. It sounded like quite a sensible voice, but all it said was, "Ten to the power of forty-eight million, four thousand and two to one against, and falling."

* * *

Please tell me what you think... 


	2. Breath mints and Brontosaurus

What Probably Didn't Happen Next - Chapter 2  
  
AN: The management takes no responsibility for people's eyes shrivelling up and falling out while reading this fanfic. Am writing while on the run from strange beer/chocolate spread mutants. Completely off topic, but does anyone write Yes, Minister fanfics? That would be interesting. Sir Humphrey is cool.  
  
"The Minister doesn't want the truth, he wants something he can tell Parliament!"  
  
EdahStellap aka Sutcac Ykoops (using a false name to avoid getting sued about eyeball incident)

* * *

Rimmer wasn't a sausage any more, which was generally a plus. But considering the fact that he was now an enormous breath mint, he wasn't so sure. Starbug was now gone, and he was in a desert. An enormous breath mint in a desert. Fantastic.  
  
In the distance he spotted someone, and tried to make his way towards them, despite the fact that breath mints are not known for their ability to move under their own power. But it worked. Oh yes. He was now a flying enormous breath mint in a desert. Marvellous. But maybe those other people would have some clue as to what was going on.  
  
He reached them after a meaninglessly long amount of time, somewhere between Infinity and the time it takes to eat a pickle. Unfortunately for him, by the time he got there the sensible-looking people had gone, and all there was was a video screen showing a penguin and a man with arms about two miles long.  
  
The voice came again. "Ten to the power of seventeen million to one against, and falling."  
  
Rimmer screamed at the sheer inconceivability of it all. He wasn't sure if 'inconceivability' was even a word, but he screamed anyway. The thought struck him that breath mints are not known for their screaming powers any more than they are for their flying ones, and he realised he was human again. It was in situations like this that you felt you were justified to go find a quiet corner, hide under a table and use your uniform as a latrine, but that didn't seem possible now.  
  
Anyway, he wasn't in uniform. He was wearing a rather fetching red and white gingham dress with a matching hat and a penguin hand-puppet. And it was hard to panic properly, what with all the terriers in tweed jackets running around.  
  
Meteors collided. A small stick failed to land on a crack for the millionth time. Four dogs playing poker were astounded to realise that they had each been dealt a full suit in the correct order, especially as it as five-card poker. All over the world people were being struck by lightening for the eighth time and bumping into Elvis at their local laundrettes.  
  
"What the smeg is going on?" Rimmer howled at the universe in general.  
  
"Ten to the power of fifteen million to one against, and falling."

* * *

The landscape was barren and rocky, and still damp from a recent torrential rainstorm. Strange noises echoed through this prehistoric land, the voices of creatures that modern-day people can only guess at the nature of. There was a rainforest in the distance, and further away, volcanoes, but here there was just dirty, dusty ground scattered with huge, misshapen rocks.  
  
A young human figure traversed this landscape. Mammals of her size and intelligence had yet to evolve here, but she was an outsider. Her clothes were soaked from the rain and her dark hair clung to her face, giving her the appearance of a drowned rat. She had a strong feeling that she ought to be somewhere and somewhen else, but this was a feeling that had grown so familiar to her over the course of her life that she had come to accept it as the norm.  
  
There was a dinosaur on the plain, although the human could not see him. It was behind a rock, not because it was hiding, but just because that was where it happened to be. It was a big reptile with a small brain, a gigantic carnivore much like Earth's Tyrannosaurus Rex. To him the human looked like lunch...  
  
The dinosaur leapt, but when it landed the human was not there anymore. Dinosaurs, much like their evolutionary descendants, birds, are not known for their intellects (where do you think the insult 'bird-brain' comes from?), and this one was no exception. It took it a good few minutes to realise that the human must have dodged. When it had finally figured that out, it stood up and lurched after her, tiny useless arms scrabbling viscously at the air. But the human was ready for it. She had a rock. Unfortunately a giant hungry dinosaur the size of a building is unlikely to be effected by anything so tiny as a rock to the head.  
  
For a moment the human looked startled by the lack of effect her normally overwhelming rock-to-the-head trick had, then she recovered herself. But instead of running away the way any sane person would, she threw more rocks. Bigger ones. None of which came anywhere near to stopping the giant lumbering closer, slavering jaws open, razor-sharp claws outstretched. It was almost close enough for another, deadlier lunge when...  
  
A certain heroic-looking floppy-haired blond man in a shiny flight jacket raced to the rescue, possibly while riding backwards on a futuristic motorcycle. He skidded in the dirt, spraying it into the dinosaur's eyes. This was enough to attract the creature's attention, and he drew it towards him and away from the girl. It was about to lunge for him when he rode behind a rock, causing the dinosaur to knock itself out on the jagged stone. Then he stopped the bike right in front of the girl creating an impressive furrow and a cloud of dust.  
  
Finally, he answered, or at least acknowledged the girl's question, which she had been screaming at the top of her lungs, mixed with random obscenities and even a certain unrepeatable-except-on-Earth country name, while the man had been doing all his fancy motorbike tricks. The question was, or at least had been the first time she said it before she really got angry, "Who are you and what the Blgm are you doing?"  
  
"The name's Ace Rimmer. There'll be time for explanations later." Ace hesitated. For a moment a crack in his armour showed through a little unprofessionalism, and for a second his bearing was more that of a weasel than a cougar. He was sure there was a second part to that particular Aceism, but the girl might be a bit young for that, for him anyway. He settled for saying, "There may be more of those chaps around."  
  
He made no move to leave. Instead he settled for looking at her in a heroic and knowledgeable fashion, as if he could tell which damsel she was and what castle she needed returning to just by that.  
  
Damsel was not a good word for her. She was about fifteen or sixteen, with shoulder-length brown-black hair that hung down over her deep brown eyes. She was quite tall, but she held herself in a slouched, round-shouldered way that seemed to match her almost-permanent dark scowl. Her soaking clothes were dark-coloured and unremarkable. Far more attention-grasping were the chipped black-varnished fingers of her right hand which relentlessly held a warning, defensive grip on a sharpened rock.  
  
She glared back at him, sizing him up. Guy called himself Ace. Stupid name. Stupid floppy hair, even stupider jacket - didn't he know that thing was out of date?  
  
"So, uh... do you have a name?" he asked finally.  
  
She shot him a particularly smouldering look. "Random Dent." She said. The look on her face said he wasn't going to get any more of an explanation than that.

* * *

"Probability of ten to one... two to one... one to one. We have normality, repeat we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem."  
  
Rimmer, now finding himself in his normal outfit in a dingy metal corridor, was not really any less panicked now. This seemed a little anti-climatic after that crazy nightmare. "Isn't there anything you think you should be telling me?" he asked the voice, not seriously expecting a sane response.  
  
"Welcome to the starship Heart of Gold. Please relax. You will be sent for shortly." After a pause, the voice continued, and it sounded less cheery, more apologetic. "Or possibly not. It depends what kind of a mood Mr Beeblebrox is in, I'm afraid. I'll see what I can do."

* * *

Up on the bridge, the assumed-dead ex-President of the Galaxy was watching a monitor with growing dismay.  
  
"Not another monkey!" groaned the left of his two heads.  
  
"You wouldn't have wanted him to die, would you?" burbled the computer nervously.  
  
"C'est la vie." said his right head.  
  
"Shut up."

* * *

TBC... please review! 


	3. The Council of Colours returns

AN: Yeah, I know it's been a while, but I will finish this. Promise. From here on, there is a plot. Also, anyone who remembers the Council of Colours, they're back, new and improved, many with differing names and concepts. Oh, and now there's eight of them. I also apologise if my spellcheck managed to insert some American spellings. I don't know why, but I'm apologising anyway.

---------------

Things hadn't been going well for the new Ace Rimmer.

He's adventuring, just getting into the swing of things, when this has to happen. Planet Al Thalmain 3, Universe 994, basic damsel-in-distress idea and the Bad Guys happen to have a few tricks up their sleeves Ace hadn't bargained for. An old Ace would've, but this guy, the hologram, is new. White-hot noise screams in his simulated ears, light threatens to blind him - would have of he were human. Flying debris to the head - it hurts a hell of a lot, but it's not going to kill him. What does the damage is the smoke. Thick, choking smoke, creeping into the joins of his light bee and playing merry hell with the delicate machinery contained.

Things flash through Ace's mind as he realizes he's had it. First thing that happens is that all semblance of Ace-ness goes out of the window. Arnold is the one lying there malfunctioning; Arnold is the one who curses, in his mind, the pretty blonde princess type that led him to this point. Arnold thinks of Lister. He thinks of Gazpacho soup. He hopes Random is safe. He thinks of life, liberty and the pursuit of cheese straws, not in any particular order. He thinks, 'Smeg. Why me?'

Then he thinks nothing. Then he stops thinking. In a horrendously beautiful effect, parts of his body, his eyes, mouth, chest, open and white light pours from them, out of control. More and more light pours out, until it seems like all the light that made up him has been expelled into the air, a competition with the setting sun. But, of course, Rimmer's time is running out. The sun has at least another forty-five billion years to go. Light expelled, his dim outline cracks, fractures, breaks into a thousand thousand pieces, and is gone like the ghost of an illusion. Maybe that's all he was in the first place.

On the stained-black ground amongst the smoking wreckage of the villains' hide-out, who's going to notice another useless rounded cylinder of scrap metal?

-----------

What had happened was this: the activation of the Infinite Improbability Drive had, for reasons as yet unclear, created a rift in the space-time continuum into which the sole occupant of the doomed spaceship Red Dwarf (one Arnold J Rimmer) had fallen. In another universe, the latest addition to the legacy of Ace Rimmer, a hard-light hologram whom the chronicler likes to refer to as _Our_ Rimmer, had met up with one of this universe's last remaining humans, a teenage girl called Random Frequent Flyer Dent. While all this was going on, the anthropomorphic personification of Death was hanging out with the alien Immortal, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, hoping to gain his aid in a revenge quest against the first Rimmer mentioned.

In the words of an A.J. Rimmer involved in another, possibly related space-time continuum crisis, "Now, from this point on, things get a little bit confusing..."

The Council of Colours was in session. This was a select group of beings whose thankless and impossible task was to create some sense of order in the Whole Sort of General Mish-Mash we call a Multiverse. It consisted of a Hoovaloo, a super-intelligent shade of blue who you may have heard of before, and a few of its relatives. These were:  
the Rronkaril, an ultra-commanding shade of red,  
the Monoobra, a highly ambitious shade of orange,  
the Yazzabamba, a distressingly cheerful shade of yellow,  
the Amalanga, a soothingly peaceful shade of green,  
the Zerribi, a time-travelling shade of indigo,  
the Kayanell, a psychic, telapathic shade of purple  
and the Xanandru, an implausibly improbable shade of pink.

Currently the Rronkaril, who was obviously the leader, was floating in an irregular but distinctly crimson cloud back and forth in front of the others' incorporeal forms. The others often guessed correctly (except for the Kayanell, who knew) that the Rronkaril would have much liked a human form, simply in order to pace.

"This won't do," it communicated to the others in a way humans have never needed to have words for, so for the sake of the chronicler's sanity she will continue as if the Colours firstly had genders and secondly spoke like people, but it needs to be empathized that they haven't and they don't.

"No, you're right," chirped in the Monoobra, a right ectoplasm-kisser, "It won't do at all."

The Monoobra believed that it could gain sonority through appearing to be wise by agreeing with people in charge and rephrasing what they sad to make it sound like his idea. He got the idea from _Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel. _It was, however, destined to fail as the Kayanell knew his thoughts, and much as she didn't like the Rronkaril, she liked him better than the Monoobra.

"Let it be," said the Amalanga, the least humanized of the Council, in fact her only humanistic trait was liking the Beatles. "We must not act rashly. All will be well in the end."

"I agree," said the Yazzabamba, "let's just hope for the best, right guys?"

"Well," said the Zerribi tentatively, "I could..."

"No you couldn't." Interrupted the Hoovaloo. "You saw what happened last time."

"I saw what happened next time." said the Kayanell. "It isn't not have won't been pretty." The tenses the Kayanell used to describe things she had foreseen but could change were wholly unsuitable for translation into a language originally developed by hairy ape-people who lived in caves and called each other 'Ugg'.

"There's no other option." said the Rronkaril, demanding attention and obedience the way only he could, "we must speak with... The Chosen One."

With utter scorn, the Hoovaloo did the non-corporeal equivalent of rolling his eyes and snapped, "We all know you just pick names out of a hat, Rronkaril. I don't know why we even listen to you. Chosen One my non-existent arse."

There was a long silence. There had never been a challenge to the Rronkaril's leadership before, not even from the Monoobra.

"I mean, come on!" said the Hoovaloo, aware that he'd overstepped the line but not about to give in, not now. "I'm the smart one. Why should you be in charge? You're surplus to requirements, really. All this Council needs is my intellect, the Kayanell and Zerribi's powers, and maybe Amalanga to give us something to work towards. And Xanandru. Just because. But you? What do you, your crony Monoobra, and that irritating Yazzabamba have that's useful?"

The words hung in the air, emitting like a gas a stifling, chilling silence. It could only have lasted a few minutes, but every second was like torture.

Then finally, like a godsend, the Xanandru said,

"Meep."

As if someone had flipped a switch, people could speak again. "It is as I suspected," said the Rronkaril. "Contact with humans is affecting us. We're growing emotions of our own. Personalities. It will lead to no good. I will have people look into it."

"How can you be sure that's a bad thing? Maybe -"

"Silence, Hoovaloo. You have said enough. I was planning on sending you to speak with the Chosen One, but in light of the situation, I think the Kayanell had better go in your stead."

As the Kayanell floated down towards the Hall of Humans, where she could take corporeal form, she met with the Hoovaloo. Sensing his melancholy mood, one that rather matched his colour, she sympathised with him, and, in her insubstantial way, she patted his arm soothingly.

"If it helps," she said, "I think you were right."

-----------------


End file.
